#Review - A Conventional Boy by Charles Stross

A Conventional Boy (Laundry Files, 13)

Charles Stross
Little, Brown, 7 January 2025
Available as: HB, 224pp,  audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9780356524641

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending giving me access to an advance e-copy of A Conventional Boy to consider for review.

A Conventional Boy is a more or less contemporary Laundry Files novella set before the events that brought us The New Management. (If you need to be told what all that means, when we are 13 books into this series, you possibly shouldn't be starting here and I'm not going to explain it all because this is only meant to be a short review - although if you do start her I think you'll soon get the hang of things.)

The protagonist is Derek Reilly, a young boy who, in the 1980s, expressed an incautious love of Dungeons and Dragons and due to an unfortunate misunderstanding was rounded up by the Laundry, the branch of the British secret services that deals with supernatural threats, due to an unfortunate misuderstanding. As a teenager who was very into D&D at the same time, I can only say, there but for the grace of God... 

Well. Decades later, Derek is still banged up, now institutionalised in a shabby camp for - what shall we call them? Not so much political as, perhaps, Ludic prisoners? - situated in the Lake District, England's wettest region. Rehabilitated to a degree, he's allowed to run his play-by-mail RPGs because the camp hierarchy think he's harmless and don't read what he's producing. If they did they might get some hints about their own futures. In an amusingly meta development we see Derek analysing and puzzling over developments in the Laundry saga that readers of the recent books will be well familiar with.

So far, so OK... till one day Derek learns that a major RPG convention is taking place just down the road and he decides to show up. That involves a fiendish escape plan and then contact with the modern world - something he's been denied for thirty years.

All of this is slickly handled and amusingly done, I love the vein of co(s)mic horror that Stross maintains in these books, delivered in the deadpan style of a 1950s field training manual, agents for the use of. At the same time there are I think definite barbs aimed at over commercialised RPG companies (or at one in particular, I'm sure you can guess which) with too much money to splash and no love for the games. One such is up to something nefarious here, and a ragtag group assembles to take them on before something really bad can happen to Derek.

Or before he can do something really bad.

Or perhaps, both.

A Quest (of course!) results, as always in the Laundry books, and while I think Stross has dropped the idea of channeling a particular different author or trope in each of these books, nevertheless, the story follows the logic, as it were, of a dungeon crawling RPG with challenges to be solved and dangers awaiting. That's of course playing to Derek's strengths - he's basically been in training for this all his adult life - and he also has help and support. The final third of the book is therefore a no holds barred battle with the danger not just the immediate threat of the dungeon, but a real peril for the visible world as well.

Great fun and a book I consumed pretty much in one reading. Recommended.

For more information about A Conventional Boy, see the publisher's website here.